At the patio party in "Ardis the Second" G. A. Vronsky (the movie man who makes a film of Mlle Larivière's novel Les Enfants Maudits) mentions a telegraph pole:
And now hairy Pedro hoisted himself onto the brink and began to flirt with the miserable girl (his banal attentions were, really, the least of her troubles).
‘Your leetle aperture must be raccommodated,’ he said.
‘Que voulez-vous dire, for goodness sake?’ she asked, instead of dealing him a backhand wallop.
‘Permit that I contact your charming penetralium,’ the idiot insisted, and put a wet finger on the hole in her swimsuit.
‘Oh that’ (shrugging and rearranging the shoulder strap displaced by the shrug). ‘Never mind that. Next time, maybe, I’ll put on my fabulous new bikini.’
‘Next time, maybe, no Pedro?’
‘Too bad,’ said Ada. ‘Now go and fetch me a Coke, like a good dog.’
‘E tu?’ Pedro asked Marina as he walked past her chair. ‘Again screwdriver?’
‘Yes, dear, but with grapefruit, not orange, and a little zucchero. I can’t understand’ (turning to Vronsky), ‘why do I sound a hundred years old on this page and fifteen on the next? Because if it is a flashback — and it is a flashback, I suppose’ (she pronounced it fieshbeck), ‘Renny, or what’s his name, René, should not know what he seems to know.’
‘He does not,’ cried G.A., ‘it’s only a half-hearted flashback. Anyway, this Renny, this lover number one, does not know, of course, that she is trying to get rid of lover number two, while she’s wondering all the time if she can dare go on dating number three, the gentleman farmer, see?’
‘Nu, eto chto-to slozhnovato (sort of complicated), Grigoriy Akimovich,’ said Marina, scratching her cheek, for she always tended to discount, out of sheer self-preservation, the considerably more slozhnïe patterns out of her own past.
‘Read on, read, it all becomes clear,’ said G.A., riffling through his own copy.
‘Incidentally,’ observed Marina, ‘I hope dear Ida will not object to our making him not only a poet, but a ballet dancer. Pedro could do that beautifully, but he can’t be made to recite French poetry.’
‘If she protests,’ said Vronsky, ‘she can go and stick a telegraph pole — where it belongs.’
The indecent ‘telegraph’ caused Marina, who had a secret fondness for salty jokes, to collapse in Ada-like ripples of rolling laughter (pokativshis’ so smehu vrode Adï): ‘But let’s be serious, I still don’t see how and why his wife — I mean the second guy’s wife — accepts the situation (polozhenie).’
Vronsky spread his fingers and toes.
‘Prichyom tut polozhenie (situation-shituation)? She is blissfully ignorant of their affair and besides, she knows she is fubsy and frumpy, and simply cannot compete with dashing Hélène.’
‘I see, but some won’t,’ said Marina. (1.32)
After the L disaster in the beau milieu of the 19th century electricity is banned on Demonia (aka Antiterra, Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set), that's why telegraph is indecent. In his book Dusha Tolstogo (“The Soul of Tolstoy,” 1927) Ivan Nazhivin mentions Tolstoy's beloved aunt Tatiana Aleksandrovna who asked her nephew how they write letters on telegraph:
И не надо преувеличивать значения пожелтевших томиков Вольтера, Санд, Байрона. Те, кто их лениво читает, - редкое исключение. Большинство же обитателей этих красивых "дворянских гнезд" все же отличается от окружающего их со всех сторон крестьянского моря. Если мужик, разиня рот, глядит на таинственную телеграфную проволоку и уверяет всех, что она протянута только для того, чтобы пустить по ней из Петербурга по всей деревенской России желанную "волю", то любимая тетушка Толстого, Татьяна Александровна, едучи с ним куда-то в карете, спрашивает его:
-- Mon cher Leon, как же это пишут письма по телеграфу?
Племянник усердно объясняет ей устройство телеграфа.
-- Oui, oui, je comprends, mon cher!.. - ласково говорит тетушка, а чрез полчаса недоумевает опять: - Как же это так, mon cher Leon? Целые полчаса вот слежу я за проволокой, а не видала ни одного письма, пробежавшего по телеграфу... (Chapter I)
Tolstoy painstakingly explains to his aunt the working principle of telegraph. Half an hour later she says with perplexity that she has been watching the wire for half an hour now and has not seen a single letter that would run over the telegraph.